I don’t know when exactly I became a pastor. The first official service at Elevation happened just over 2 years ago. But I remember very vividly waking up at 5 o’ clock one morning well over a year earlier, gripped by a sense that everything in my life had dramatically and irreversibly changed.

The night before, Chunks and his wife Amy had officially committed to be the first couple on the core team of this unnamed church located in a city yet to be determined. We had a meeting at Outback with Fred, a church planting strategist I knew who was passing through town. The meeting served to solidify our commitment to do this thing, and the evening was casual and normal enough… no lightning bolts. But man, the next morning when I woke up, I felt something in my gut that can most closely be compared to the moment I held my firstborn son and realized: Dear Lord, there’s no turning back from this. Nothing will ever be the same… for better and for worse… mostly for better… I think… I’m a completely different person than I was yesterday.

At this point, I had been a preacher for 8 years. I had been dreaming about starting a church, and planning to be a pastor one day, from the time I was 16 years old. But suddenly, this wasn’t a pipe dream or abstract theoretical rhetoric anymore. I now had people who were taking a sizable risk so that they could call me their pastor, and follow me where God led. They were counting on me to be their man of God. It freaked me out, in the best way you can imagine.
(If I had any idea there would be a couple thousand more of these people in the next few years, I would have thrown up in a trash can and called the whole thing off on the spot. Thank God He leads us one step at a time.)

I remember crawling out of bed well before the sun came up that morning, pulling out my Bible, and reading Joshua 1, the part about not being afraid, over and over again. Then I read the Pastoral Epistles-particularly the requirements of an elder/overseer. (Even reading the word elder and applying it to myself was comedic and intimidating. I was 25!)
I read those qualifications many times over the next few weeks. I listed them out in columns on my little notepads that I carried around before I got hip and bought a Moleskine.
And I begged God in my heart that by His grace He would shape me to be that kind of man to lead His Church for His glory.
What a standard! What an undeserved honor… and an incomparable life pursuit.